Astrophotography has taken Johnny Horne all over the world

Monica Holland Sunday Life editor @FO_Lifestyle

Saturday

Aug 25, 2018 at 1:16 PMAug 25, 2018 at 1:16 PM

STEDMAN — This time last year, Johnny Horne was on the West Coast. His love of all things celestial — and photographing them — carried him clear across the continent and right into the path of a total solar eclipse.

Horne had traveled to Salem, Oregon, for clear skies and a spot in the moonshadow.

He’d last seen a total solar eclipse 16 years prior, in Zambia. He’s witnessed five in all; from a ship in the Caribbean, from Cabo San Lucas on the southern tip of the Baja California Peninsula in Mexico. But most of the time, he watches the universe unfold from his own backyard.

“The reach from here, between the telescope and technology, is an extraordinary thing,” Horne says from his desk as a meteor flits across his simulated night sky screensaver.

We’re sitting in his personal observatory, built on the same spot from whence he’s watched the heavens since he was a little boy.

The domed building has been part of this small town 40 years, tucked behind Horne’s home that his great grandfather built in 1911 and a stand of evergreens.

It houses a 12½-inch reflector telescope, mounted with 8-inch and 4-inch scopes, outfitted with an astronomical camera.

The large scope has been there since 1978, when Horne saddled it onto a freestanding column, anchored by a concrete pier 4 feet underground. He built the observatory around the column. “There’s no contact, so you can walk around and it doesn’t shake the image,” Horne says.

His hobbies — amateur astronomy and photography — have only strengthened over time. He’s parlayed them both into a career, serving as longtime photo editor and “Backyard Universe” writer for The Fayetteville Observer, as well as a photography instructor at FTCC and Sky & Telescope magazine contributor.

Now retired, he still looks into the lens with the same sense of wonder that inspired him to build a telescope when he was 14, grinding and polishing the mirrors himself.

“I grew up in the thick of the U.S. manned spaceflight program in the 60s,” Horne says.

“It’s been my sole pastime all these years,” Horne says. “It’s not like I’ve done this in addition to other things; I’ve done this instead of other things.

“The first pictures I took and developed myself were not of the family dog, they were of the moon.”

As a 25-year-old, just a year into his marriage with Ann, Horne used plywood, fiberglass cloth and resin — boat building materials —to fashion a 1,200-pound dome for the top of his backyard observatory.

”I didn’t have any real plans, but I knew what I wanted it to look like,” Horne says.

He’d been inspired by the four-story, domed observatory he saw in Concord on N.C. 49, as he headed to shoot the Kemper Open golf tournament in Charlotte.

He stopped to get a look, and the owner gave Horne a tour of the impressive structure that housed a 20-inch scope. They’re still good friends to this day.

“It was fairly easy,” Horne says of the undertaking, typical of his smooth, unpretentious demeanor.

“I built the dome on the ground, not having a clue how I would get it up on top of the building when I was finished. I was 25 years old, you know?”

Horne often drove past a clawed crane that lifted lumber from trucks and loaded it onto rail cars. It was at the pulpwood yard by the train tracks that once ran through town, just a block or two from his home.

He didn’t see why the crane couldn't raise his dome 14 feet, so one day he stopped to ask. The next morning, for a fee of $10, the crane operator took the machine to Horne’s home and placed the heavy dome on top of the building.

Horne rotates the entire dome by hand, pushing its castors along a round metal track. The interior of the curved roof is covered with foil insulation, the kind used for duct work. It’s very Apollo 11.

Mechanized shutters open a gap in the dome and the scope points toward Jupiter.

“It’s very much like a portal,” Horne says. “You can come up here and see everything.

“It’s like, if you’re into the Civil War, been an enthusiast all your life, and then one day you go to Gettysburg and walk those fields. It’s made more real to you.

“That happens out here every night. It’s not some abstract; it’s very real.”

He summons me to the eyepiece, and hovering there in the black circle is the Gas Giant, striped in burnt orange and soft white.

It’s like seeing a celebrity. Jupiter! I loved you in third-grade science!

“It’s not a likeness or an image, it’s sure enough Jupiter,” Horne says.

The image is fed through the camera to a monitor on a desk beside the scope. The image of Jupiter sharpens and blurs, floating in and out of focus, distorted by atmospheric turbulence in the half-million miles between us.

“One astronomer said, ‘It’s like trying to look at a silver dollar at the bottom of a swimming pool that’s being used for Olympic trials.’ ” Horne says. But technology has helped him capture clear images.

“You make a video, like, a hundred frames per second, for about a minute. You take that video and you dump it in the software, and it looks at each one of those frames.

“It’ll extract all the sharpest ones, and it’ll stack them, one on top of the other. That’s how you get the image.”

He swings the dome around again, just a little, and points the scope at the moon. It’s 238,900 miles away, magnified about 200 times.

Craters that span 60 miles across the face of the moon look the size of dimes.

“The smallest thing you can see on the moon through these telescopes is about a half-mile across,” Horne explains as crickets sing from the damp grass and the drive motor that turns the telescope in synchronicity with the satellite clicks like a metronome.

“The whole moon is about 2,000 miles across,” he adds. “You could see Stedman if it were on the moon.”

Horne built his observatory so that he wouldn’t have to set up his telescope every time he wanted to observe the sky.

His techy tools allow him to watch from a monitor downstairs. He doesn’t have to tough out below-freezing, middle-of-the-night star gazing from the open dome anymore.

There’s been a lot of upgrading over time, but not to the original optical tube.

“Telescopes haven’t changed much in 400 years. They still work the same as they did in Galileo’s time,” Horne says.

“They’re specific, but they’re not complex.

“What I hook to it is newer, but it’s the same scope. With each new piece of technology, it pushes the limits.”

Telescopes collect and focus light from distant objects through refraction or reflection, using lenses or mirrors. The image is illuminated, and it takes up more space on the retina, so it appears larger and more clear.

“If you’re a professional astronomer, the question you get asked is, ‘What is the nature of the universe?’ If you’re an amateur, like me, the question you get asked is, ‘How far can you see with that thing?’ ” Horne says.

“And I don’t know the answer, really.”

An unanswered question, though, doesn’t deter the man who had an asteroid named after him by the International Astronomical Union (Horne was in the same naming class with Fred Rogers and Orville Wright.). He even has an “Asteroids” video game by the couch downstairs in his observatory.

“When I was younger, I was curious about the natural world and the things around me — every day of my life. I can’t remember not being that way.”

Horne has chased the stars all over the world, even to Australia, where he photographed Halley’s Comet in 1986. He’s made his mark in Fayetteville by computing the dates when the sunrise would shine right through the Market House arches (Nov. 11 and Jan. 29, if you want to get that shot.).

But it’s on his own piece of land, his boyhood homeplace, where he finds his axis.

“I’m surprised all the time. But I’m mainly surprised at what the reach is from right here, in some Stedman backyard.

“You can photograph objects and details that you can’t even see through the same telescope. That’s what amateur astronomical photography has done these days; stuff from someone’s backyard is better than what we had in our science books.

“It’s exciting.

“You wonder when it’s going to end,” Horne says.

Like the ever-expanding universe, there’s no end in sight.

And Horne, for all of his looking up, is firmly grounded on his path.

“People think you’re some kind of rocket scientist if you’re doing this stuff, and that’s not the case at all.

“I take pictures. That’s what I do.”

Sunday Life editor Monica Holland can be reached at mholland@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3518. For more stories like this, follow @FO_Lifestyle on Twitter.

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